


Deep in the Wood

by TiyeTiye



Series: Things That Go Bump In The Night [8]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Attacks, Danger, Forests, Giant Spiders, Mountains, Raids, Spiders, Trapped, Visions, monster attack, time crunch, time limit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 09:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14133411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiyeTiye/pseuds/TiyeTiye
Summary: On the eve of the attack on Kattegat, and hoping to save their mother in time, Ubbe and Sigurd take a dangerous route home through a hostile forest.





	Deep in the Wood

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Violence, blood and gore, creature horror, violence towards animals, swearing, misogyny, just a little bit of peril

The bitch tricked them, and Ubbe barely slept at all that night.

After Lagertha’s warriors had burst into the room, dragged him out of the bed he’d been busy sharing with Margrethe, and thrown him into that dirty cell he’d spent the rest of the night pacing its floor like a caged beast, backwards and forwards in angry lines while the stars wheeled across the sky. He managed to drift off for a few moments after the moon slipped below the horizon, but his sleep was haunted by visions of flying arrows and the clash of sword on shield and his mother’s determined face. 

When the sun came up and they were finally released, Ubbe took only a moment to put the fear of the gods into that pale-haired wench Margrethe before demanding his horse. Something was wrong. The gods had shown it to him in his dream. Something was dreadfully wrong and he and Sigurd had to get back to Kattegat as soon as possible. Their mother needed them, he felt it in his bones, but they were so far away, and something was dreadfully wrong. 

For the first leg of the journey, Sigurd rode beside him without comment, grim faced, his drive to get back to Kattegat burning just as brightly as his brother’s. The two of them stayed silent for miles, until they reached the point near the great oak tree where the road split - north towards the mountain pass or south towards the river. Sigurd turned south and was halfway to the next bend in the road before he realized that Ubbe was not behind him and was sitting atop his horse back in the middle of the fork in the road. 

“Ubbe?” Sigurd called. “What are you doing? Come on! We must hurry!” 

Ubbe didn’t answer for a moment, merely glancing over at his brother before turning back to stare off at the road to the north with a furrowed brow. His hesitation was understandable. Both brothers knew that while the southern route back to Kattegat was safer, mostly free from bandits and wolves, it would be a full two days of hard riding, skirting around the edges of the tall mountains and the thick, dark woods that cloaked them, before they saw their home again. Taking the northern route through the woods and over the mountain pass would cut that time in half, but both Ubbe and Sigurd had grown up hearing tales around the fire of the creatures that lurked in the dark wood.

Wolves the size of a man. Bears the size of a house. Monsters and demons. Draugr and trolls. They’d been told to never take that road, warned of the travelers and wanderers that went missing, but still Ubbe sat atop his horse and looked to the north. Something was wrong, their mother needed them, and they had to get home. 

Ubbe checked his sword in its sheath, looked back at Sigurd, and turned his horse’s head to the north. 

“Ubbe!” Sigurd shouted. “Ubbe, stop!” 

“Come on, Sigurd,” Ubbe said, without even bothering to turn. 

Sigurd dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and galloped back to the fork in the road, shouting at his brother’s retreating back.

“What are you doing?! You’re going the wrong way!”

“Come on Sigurd!” Ubbe called back again. 

“What good will we be to mother if we get eaten by wolves!?”

Ubbe reined in his horse, turning in a tight circle and wheeling back around to glare at his brother. 

“What good will we be if we take too long and mother is dead when we get there?!” he yelled. “Don’t lie to yourself Sigurd - you feel it just as much as I do! I bet you even dreamed it last night, just like I did! Kattegat is under attack and we are not there to defend mother, so **_come on_**!” 

Snarling at his brother one last time, Ubbe wheeled his horse back around and galloped off towards the north. Sigurd watched him go until he was nearly out of sight, sitting on his horse at the crossroads, nervously rubbing the handle of his axe, before he set his heels to his horse and chased after him. Ubbe had just reached the outskirts of the woods by the time Sigurd caught up with him. 

“Going to get us both killed,” Sigurd grumbled as he slowed his horse to fall into place beside his brother. Ubbe at least had the grace not to smile. 

It had been a bright, calm day when the brothers set out for home, but the branches of the gnarled trees they rode past kept the road below cloaked in a perpetual twilight. For a while, the brothers were accompanied by the chirping of birds and the rustling of smallanimals in the undergrowth, but the signs of life started to come less and less as they rode on. Soon, the silence under the trees was broken only by the clomping of their horses’s hooves on the earth, but still they kept heading north, heedless of the road growing rougher and the trees growing taller. Haunted by his vision and fearing for his mother, Ubbe would not turn back and Sigurd would not leave him behind. 

As the day went on and the brothers climbed higher and higher towards the mountain pass, Sigurd became aware of a strange…..substance hanging among the trees. It was a silvery-white, in strands thick as a man’s forearm, and strung from branch to branch, tree to tree like an unnatural vine. Sigurd leaned over, tapped Ubbe on the shoulder, and pointed at a large patch of the stuff off in the trees as their horses walked past it. Ubbe barely flicked his eyes at it before his gaze went back to scanning the forest around them. 

“I see it,” Ubbe whispered. He slowly drew his sword and laid it across his saddle, his horse not breaking stride. Next to him, Sigurd held the reins of his horse in one hand and pulled his axe free. 

At first, the brothers spotted the rope-like strands only rarely, scattered far and wide throughout the forest, entangled in trees more than a bow-shot from the road, but as the day went on they saw more and more of the strange stuff. What had been single strands draped between random groups of trees multiplied, until it seemed as though a great giant had draped a silvery fishing net across the forest around them, a net that pulled tighter and tighter towards the road as they continued on. As they went by, Sigurd curiously reached out to tap his axe against a piece of it, but Ubbe stopped him. 

“Don’t touch it,” Ubbe hissed in the strangely muffled silence. “We don’t know what kind of creature made it.”

Sigurd drew back and suppressed a shiver, thinking again of all the stories he’d heard about this wood growing up. Ubbe was right. The strands were now so thick across the trees that they rendered the forest beyond almost imperceptible- who knew what sort of creature might have crafted them?

Suddenly, an agonized cry cut through the silence. It was the shrill, canine yelp of a wolf in pain, almost deafening to their ears before it was sharply, decisively cut off. The noise startled both of their horses, the animals rearing and whinnying with fright. Sigurd was unable to catch his grip before his horse threw him off, straight into the wall of silver strands lining the road. To his horror, he stuck. 

“Help! Get it off! _Get it off!_ ” he shouted.

“Shut up, idiot!” Ubbe hissed, trying to calm Sigurd’s horse while regaining control of his own. “Shut up!”

“I’m stuck, get me out of here!” Sigurd struggled violently against the sticky ropes bound to his clothes, his jerking movements sending ripples out through the silvery wall in all directions and seeming to only entangle him more. 

“Hurry Ubbe! It burns! Ahh, fuck - it _burns_!” he cried. The skin of his wrists and hands was beginning to turn an angry red and his back was starting to feel frighteningly warm through the wool of his clothes. 

Ubbe was still struggling to catch Sigurd’s panicked horse, but it would not be calmed and bolted away down the road, back the way they’d come towards Hedeby. He threw a curse at the fleeing animal before hurling himself out of the saddle, looping his horse’s reins around a nearby clear branch, and hurrying to free his shouting, still-struggling brother. He drew his sword and hacked at the silvery strands that bound Sigurd in place, his blade flashing forward through the grey gloom again and again. The sticky ropes parted slowly, each strand requiring several blows to hack apart, and all the while Sigurd’s groans of pain grew louder and louder, until Ubbe was finally able to pull him free. Sigurd’s knees buckled when his boots hit the road, but he hissed and pulled away when Ubbe tried to catch him. Gently smoothing his hands over his brother’s scalp, Ubbe tilted Sigurd’s face up and made him meet his eyes. 

“Shhh! Shhh, shhh, shhh!” Ubbe said, trying to quiet Sigurd’s continuing groans of pain. “Sigurd, are you alright? Can you stand? We can’t stay here….we need to move.” His eyes darted around the forest again. The silver strands walling in the road were still vibrating with the force of his sword blows, and they still had no idea where the cry of pain had come from to startle their horses. 

Sigurd gritted his teeth, quieted his moans of pain, and forced himself to his feet. Leaning heavily on Ubbe’s shoulder, his brother helped him across the road to their one remaining horse. 

“Here….you ride for now,” Ubbe said. He boosted Sigurd up into the saddle and freed the reins, leading the horse and his brother deeper into the wood. 

The road continued to gently rise for perhaps a quarter mile, until it leveled out onto a small plateau. The land here was rocky, jagged and uneven, the road forcing Ubbe to lead the horse along a serpentine path around deep pits and channels cut through the earth. The silvery ropes were even thicker here - stretching around the plateau from trunk to trunk to wall them in as well as arching overhead, nearly blocking out the sky as they wove from treetop to treetop. 

And the trees….the trees bore strange fruit. Great, hulking shapes, tightly wrapped in the silver ropes and hanging from the thickest branches. Some looked like cattle and others like deer or great stags, one or two like horses. Some looked like the wolves and bears that prowled the deepest reaches of the forest, and some, a horrifying handful of them, looked like men. The air smelled like sickness and plague and death, and Ubbe’s heart nearly stopped when he spotted one of the man shaped things that was still moving in small, desperate twitches.

“Ubbe…” Sigurd whispered. 

“I see it,” he said.

“No Ubbe, _listen_. The trees…The wind…” 

Ubbe cocked his head, scanning the trees around them. There _was_ no wind - the trees bore their nightmarish burdens in stillness and silence….so where was that dry, raspy, clicking noise coming from? 

Ubbe had only Sigurd’s frightened shout as a warning before a huge weight slammed into his back, knocking him off his feet, with Sigurd landing on top of him in the dirt. 

Their lone remaining horse screamed in pain and terror as the brothers struggled to their feet, it’s attacker something out of a nightmare. It was a massive spider, bigger than a horse, black as night, its bulbous body covered in thick armored plates, with fangs as long as a man’s arm. As the brothers watched, the thing sank its fangs into the flesh of their poor horse, it’s venom making the horse’s flesh bubble and smoke as the horse struggled still to regain its feet. The spider held it down, the horse’s flesh growing black and dead around its wound, until the poor thing gave a final scream, then went silent. 

Ubbe grabbed Sigurd by the elbow, pulling him away from the thing.

“Move.”

The brothers turned to run, and the spider, it’s attention drawn by Sigurd’s hiss of pain, sprang after them. 

The rough terrain forced Ubbe and Sigurd to stick to the road, the spider’s many feet sounding like a herd of galloping horses. Ubbe hoped that the road might lead them out, bring them to a similar tunnel through the strands like the one that had brought them in, but his frantic eyes could not find a way - the road ahead was abruptly cut off by a wall of solid, impenetrable silver. Ubbe and Sigurd drew their weapons, but could manage only a handful of blows to part just a single strand of web before the monster was on them. 

“Here it comes!” Sigurd shouted. 

The brothers stood side by side to face it, but their weapons were of little use against the spider’s thick armor. Their blades only managed to draw shallow gouges along the thing’s hide and it was all they could do to dodge it’s glistening fangs as it backed them farther and farther towards the wall of spider web at their backs. Then, Ubbe got lucky. As Sigurd blocked a thrust of the spider’s fangs towards his abdomen, Ubbe lunged forwards and sliced his sword across one of the monster’s unprotected many-faceted eyes. 

The thing screamed, a shrill, piercing cry that stabbed through their skulls as it reared up and away from them, thrashing its head in pain. Sigurd turned back to the wall of spiderweb, hoping to hack a way through while the monster was distracted by its agony, but Ubbe pulled him away. 

“What are you doing?” Sigurd cried, fighting against Ubbe’s hold. “We have to make a way through!”

“Not yet!” Ubbe shouted over the spider’s piercing screams. “We have to kill it here or it follows us and we bring it down on Kattegat! Come on!” 

Ubbe yanked him away, and the brothers took, one, two, three, running steps and leapt over one of the deep channels that criss-crossed the plateau, the spider following hot on their heels as they ran through the trees. They leapt another and another, the sound of the spider’s eight legs growing louder, its weight shaking the earth beneath their feet as it gained on them. The brothers leapt another pit, and Ubbe was horrified to realize that he was alone as he landed on the other side.

“Sigurd!” he screamed, casting about for his brother. He whirled and hacked at the spider’s remaining good eye, then took off back across the plateau as it dodged to the side and scrambled to recover. “Sigurd!” he screamed again. 

“Here!” came the answering cry, and Ubbe felt the fist around his heart loosen just a bit at the sight of his bother’s pale hair sticking up above the rim of one of the pits they had just leapt. He must have fallen short on his last leap and fallen inside. 

“Hang on, I’ll get you out!” Ubbe said, dodging another strike of the spider. 

“No! Bring it back around! Bring it to me! Like grandfather!” Ubbe saw Sigurd draw the long, brutal knife their father had given him and hold it above his head. For the first time since Margrethe’s betrayal Ubbe allowed himself to hope. 

His hope gave him a fresh burst of speed, and he dashed across the plateau, leaping over two deep channels before approaching Sigurd’s hiding place. Holding his sword high, with the spider but a moment behind him, Ubbe leapt into the pit beside his brother. The monster’s momentum carried it over the rim of the pit, and as one Ubbe and Sigurd thrust their blades towards the sky and into the spider’s soft underbelly.

Again the still air of the plateau was rent apart by the scream of the spider as the brother’s blades sank home. The great wounds in its belly split the thing open like a rotten fruit and showered Ubbe and Sigurd in a deluge of black slime and entrails. The force of its final leap slammed the spider against the lip of the pit and the two men had to dodge and weave around the spider’s wickedly barbed legs as it thrashed out its death throes. Finally, the hulking monster’s twitching died away, and the brothers were able to climb out of the pit. 

Sigurd grimaced at the sight of the spider’s fangs, now leaking its yellowish venom out over the ground. He nudged it with a boot, lolling its head over until its one good eye pointed towards the sky. 

“What do we do now?” he said, gasping for breath. 

“We get rid of it,” said Ubbe, looking from the spider to the forest around them. “We get rid of all of it.”

The brothers heaved the spider’s corpse off the ledge and down into the pit where they had killed it, piling fallen wood on top and and setting it all alight. They watched it burn in silence, its body popping and crackling in the heat of the glowing embers as a foul, greasy smoke rose up through the branches above. 

The web was far easier to burn through than it was to cut. Before they left, to continue over the pass and down through the mountains to Kattegat, the brothers tossed armloads of burning torches behind them around the plateau. Whatever horror had given birth to the monster that they had just killed, they could not take the chance of another discovering the spider’s trap and taking its place. The flames rose high and bright, cutting through the gloom of the thick woods, but Ubbe and Sigurd quickly put their backs to them and lost sight of their brilliance. Their mother needed them, and something was dreadfully wrong. 


End file.
